Like Living With A Stranger
by Princess Annabell
Summary: "It was like having a stranger in the house. A shadow hiding behind each corner, just watching. Watching as everyone went about their day-to-day life. Never joining in, never taking part in anything. Just lingering." Midori reflects what it's like now that Kazuto is back home.


**Like Living With A Stranger**

It was like having a stranger in the house. A shadow hiding behind each corner, just watching. Watching as everyone went about their day-to-day life. Never joining in, never taking part in anything. Just lingering.

Midori remembered the day everything changed. Coming home from work to find her daughter crying outside his room, too afraid to go inside when she knew what she'll find. Midori hadn't heard yet, she had no way of knowing, no way of hearing it, not at her work. But even so, just standing outside the door she could feel it.

The suffocating silence.

The emptiness, the only thing present in that room.

Over 2 years later and finally that emptiness is gone but the silence remains.

It's like a stranger's living in the house. Smiling small, fragile smiles walking around with pale, paper like skin, with dull black eyes that look almost soulless till you see the sadness held within.

This was not her son. How could it be, when she remembered a bright, bubbly boy with a smile that could light up the world and eyes that sparkled with mischief, and kindness seeming to pour out from every part of him. No this was not her son. This was a stranger, one who was living in place of her son.

She knew this. She could feel it, down to her bones. It was wrong. And yet, she had no idea what to do.

Because … because this stranger was her son. He is the boy whose parents died, who grew up her son, who smiled and laughed and played along with her daughter, he is the boy who found out about his adoption when he was 10, he is the boy who fell in love with computers when he was 4, he is the boy who got trapped in a fake world, taken away from her and he is the boy who came back to her as a man.

As a stranger.

What are you supposed to do, when your only son becomes a stranger to you?

He's in pain. She knows this, she can see this every single time she walks past him and sees as he stares outside the window, every time she sees him looking at nothing and everything, each time he flinches for no reason, she sees. He's in pain and she can't do anything about it. He's a stranger to her.

Sometimes she hears him. Through the walls and the cracks of slightly opened doors, she hears him groaning, crying, sometimes screaming. She doesn't know what to do. What can she do?

He says the weirdest things sometimes:

"Normally I'll be farming."

"It feels weird to be around so many people."

"It feels like I have no HP left."

"I'd forgotten what rain felt like."

It seemed as if he came back in shades of black. When Suguha questioned his lack of coloured clothing he looked at her weirdly and said, "what do you mean? I always wear black." As if he couldn't remember a time when his favourite colour was red, and he wore orange or green tops with prints and words splatted across them.

It was the strangest feeling. Her home was full for the first time in 2 years, but it seemed quieter now than it ever was before.

What was she to do? How was she to cope? Knowing what she knew. Seeing what she saw. Was it like this for everyone? He's back and yet she's stuck in a time where he was gone.

The horrible, sick truth she kept to herself because she knew, she had gotten used to it.

The silence. The emptiness. Not having him.

She lost her son. In more ways than one.

How can someone fall asleep as one person and wake as another?

He's not her son anymore. She's not his mother. Yet she was and he was and somehow this had to work. Even though she had gotten used to only having one child.

Her horrible, sickening thoughts climb back up from the darkness of her mind:

'He shouldn't be here. He should be asleep, in a coma, trapped in some other place. I only have a daughter, not a son. My nephew died, two years ago, and I wish he never came back because it's so much easier for him to be dead then it is for him to be alive and be different. I wish he had died.'

He was killed, then resurrected. Changed in a way she could never understand.

Oh yes. She had gotten her son back, but now he was a stranger wearing her son's skin. Having none of his memories and a dulled version of his personality.

After losing him, morning him, seeing him again, she can tell that ...

From now on, she lives with a stranger in her house.

* * *

**Hey Guys!**

**Thanks for those quick reviews letting me know what was happening!**

**Hope you all enjoyed the story!**

**~Annabell**


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